


Chrysalis

by howldax



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Dogs, Empathy, Gen, Gender Dysphoria, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Lots of OCs - Freeform, Misgendering, Reference to self harm, Trans Will, Trans!Will, not complete but can be currently read as a story by itself, transphobic language
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-10-04
Updated: 2014-10-04
Packaged: 2018-02-19 20:23:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2401727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/howldax/pseuds/howldax
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will always knew she was different.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chrysalis

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, this was written for homoette on tumblr, who asked for trans!Will and got this. First Hannibal fic! *pops open champagne* 
> 
> I've written this as someone who isn't trans but has experienced quite severe gender dysphoria, so if I've said something that is really inaccurate or offensive etc. then I'm very sorry and please do say, I've used my own experiences and those I've read about and researched but I'll always take concrit! 
> 
> 2 years later edit: sike i'm trans as fuck lmao

Will always knew she was different.

 

She could see what other people wanted – how their minds worked, their secret desires – for as long as she could remember. It was both a blessing and a curse. Will recognised the longing for violence hidden behind the smile of a boy in her class and stayed as far away from him as possible. She told her friends to stay away too but they laughed and ignored her warnings.

 

When he broke Sarah's arm one day by pushing her off the monkey-bars, Will was the only one unsurprised.

 

Will had no love of violence. When she next saw a child with the same glimmer in their eyes, a girl this time, she told the teacher on playground duty.

 

“Mary wants to cut Jack with the art scissors,” Will said earnestly. “You mustn't let her.”

 

The teacher called in Will's father for a meeting to discuss her home life.

 

“You can't make up things like that, Will,” her father said, and Will saw the worry growing in his weary eyes. She saw whisky in the twitch of his hand and restlessness in the lines of his face.

 

“Sorry,” she said, and kept her mouth shut when Susan came into school with two Chinese burns on her left forearm and a cut across her right palm. Will closed her eyes and light swept across her vision, and she watched Mary corner Susan behind the playset in the park; watched her twist Susan's skin until she cried out and managed to pull away, cutting her palm on the rough edge of the swing-chain. Will blinked her eyes open and saw that it wasn't Mary's hands on Susan at all, it was hers, pinching and twisting and grinning down at the crying girl. She gasped, and when a hand touched her shoulder she jerked away with a cry.

 

“Will?”

 

She was back in the classroom, the class staring at her with curious, open faces, but Will could only stare in horror at Susan – across the room, confused but not sobbing in agony – before she doubled over and threw up.

 

“I don't know,” Will said later, when the teacher asked what had happened. “I just felt really sick.” She knew she couldn't tell them what she saw. They wouldn't believe her, and the bags under her father's eyes would just get darker.

 

Will had nightmares for weeks, and not just when she was asleep; at night she dreamed of Susan's tears, could taste them on her tongue, and was unnerved by how much her dream-self enjoyed the flavour. In the daytime she saw Susan's twisted expression on the faces of her classmates, and was haunted by Mary's compassionless, glee-tinted pleasure. Sometimes she felt it so keenly she thought it might be her own.

 

“Will, your teachers are worried about you,” Will's father said one day over dinner – fresh-caught trout with boiled potatoes and beans. “They say you've been quiet, withdrawn, that you daydream. What's going on?”

 

“Sorry,” Will said, sneaking trout and potato into a paper napkin to feed to the stray dog that was hanging around the neighbourhood recently.

 

A few weeks later Mary did stab Jack with the art scissors. They went so deep in his belly that he had to have surgery, and nearly died.

 

The teacher Will'd told about Mary started giving her odd looks, and before long they were all unnerved by her mere presence. Will ignored them and withdrew further into herself, avoiding the pitying eyes of the other children when the teachers tried to minimise contact with her. Soon enough the other children followed the example they were set and stopped talking to her as well. Will felt their uncertainty and their fear when she looked into their eyes, and stayed quiet when a boy came into the classroom one day with bloody scrapes on both knees and she saw his father shoving him to the floor before she could stop herself. She hadn't even looked in his eyes this time. It was getting harder to ignore what she could see.

 

“It's like I'm there when they do it,” Will told Billy, the stray she'd been feeding. “I can't tell anyone, they don't understand. People are scared of what they don't understand.” Billy rested his head on her knee and huffed out a warm breath. Will smiled. “You don't care that I'm different, do you?”

 

Billy licked Will's elbows, which she assumed was affirmation.

 

~

 

By the time she was ten Will knew to hide differences. She ignored the pendulum's swing and the visions that always followed, of Tony's father kicking him or Sasha's uncle forcing himself on her or Michael dissecting live frogs with a scalpel he stole from the school's science department. She made herself normal, and managed to fit in with the other kids as if she were like them.

 

Will began to learn about puberty, which was weird and uncomfortable. She'd never noticed much of a difference between girls and boys except for their hair and the fact that the girls sometimes wore dresses and talked about stuff Will wasn't interested in, but now the school started teaching her about breasts and periods and how none of the boys would get these things.

 

“Why will I get breasts?” she asked once.

 

“Because you're a girl,” the teacher told her. She said it with such confidence and surety that Will knew she must be right. She ignored the feeling itching in the back of her mind and didn't ask any more questions.

 

The girls started developing, just like the teacher had said they would, and the boys started looking at them differently because of it. A couple of times Will glanced into the eyes of fellow students and saw their thoughts, felt their wants as strongly as if they were her own, and had to avert her eyes, blushing fiercely. She avoided eye contact even more vehemently than she had before.

 

All of the girls were excited about the tiny lumps protruding from their chests; Will was still flat-chested and glad for reasons she couldn't define.

 

Will had always gotten along better with boys than girls her age. Her hair was short enough for her to fit in, and the fact that she wore trousers instead of skirts – they were simply more comfortable – meant that some days she got mistaken for a boy, which gave her a warmth in her chest that she tried desperately to smother. Normal kids didn't feel like this. Being different wasn't a good thing, however that difference manifested. She'd learned that a long time ago.

 

Despite her best attempts at fitting in, the girls in Will's class didn't like to include her in their games. They told her she acted too much like a guy, as if it was a bad thing, but she had no interest in their dolls anyway. Will felt more at home with the boys in her year, who accepted her without question after she made sure they knew she was just like them, as tough as they were and unafraid to stand up for herself. A few of them teased her and called her by her full name, 'Wilhelmina', for a while until she told them to shove off and call her Will. She'd been insisting on it since she was about six, preferring the shortening. It was almost inevitable that a mouthful like Wilhelmina got shortened, really.

 

~

 

It took Will a while to notice that she was growing breasts. She didn't pay much attention to them – or even properly realise that she would grow them one day, despite the words being parroted at her from various sources – until one of the guys punched her playfully in the chest and it actually hurt.

 

She didn't like it. None of the other guys had the little bumps on their chests or had to wear bras. She started being treated differently – her father told her to stop play-fighting, that it was 'unladylike', and one of the girls in her class told her she looked prettier with her hair down. Will kept it up in a sloppy bun so it didn't touch her neck. Her father bought her a skirt for school.

 

“But dad, I don't want to wear a skirt,” Will protested. “I like trousers.”

 

“You'll have to wear a skirt or a dress at some point in your life, Will. For job interviews, for prom, on nights out. You should start getting used to it.”

 

“I'll wear suits,” Will said defiantly. “All the boys do.”

 

“You aren't a boy, Will,” her father said gently, and the feeling in Will's chest she'd stifled for so long swelled to a burning.

 

“Why not?” she demanded, and when Will looked into her father's eyes she saw fear of this unknown; but Will was tired of pretending.

 

“Because that's not how it works,” he said. “You're born a boy or a girl, and you were born a girl.”

 

“But I don't feel like a girl,” Will said, desperation tinting her voice. “It doesn't feel _right._ ”

 

“ _Please_ , Will,” Will's father said, sounding almost equally desperate. “Please just try it for a few days.” 

 

Will looked into his eyes for a moment longer, and heard the comments from other parents about Will, about her lack of femininity. Heard the doubts about her father's parenting skills, about her home life. Just like when she was a child and saw Mary's violence in the marks on Sarah's forearm, her differences were reflecting on her father and pulling him into the spotlight, the last place he wanted to be.

 

“I'm sorry,” Will said, the words tasting acidic. “I'll try it.”

 

~

 

Will tried it and hated it; she felt exposed and stuck somewhere between the boys with their trousers and short hairstyles and the girls with their skirts and long, swishy hair. The guys teased her for the three days she stuck it out, calling her prissy and girly.

 

Will's father found the skirt neatly cut up and used as parts in fishing lures, and didn't buy Will another one.

 

As puberty progressed, the differences between the boys and girls grew more pronounced. The boys had (if they were lucky) tiny wisps of beard to show off, and underarm hair and cracking voices. They smelled a bit strange sometimes – but not in a bad way – and got more muscular, and some developed really prominent Adam's apples. Will envied them with an odd kind of jealous desperation.

 

Will, like the girls in her class, developed differently, getting larger breasts (still quite small in Will's case, thankfully) and wider hips (again, Will counted herself lucky for the relative narrowness of hers). Will had awful spots for a couple of months on her face and chest, which she got called pizza face for until she told the name-callers to piss off. One similarity between Will and her male friends was that she grew visible body hair – dark like the boys' – and she was so relieved that she wasn't completely different from them that she almost cried.

 

It turned out, though, that girls had to shave their legs, unlike boys.

 

“It's gross for girls to have leg hair, and underarm hair is even worse,” said Emily, a girl in Will's English class.

 

“Why isn't it gross on guys?” Will asked, and Emily shrugged.

 

“It's just different,” she said, and looked uncomfortably at the small patch of dark hair showing out of Will's shirt sleeve. Will felt ashamed of her unshaven body.

 

When she got home, Will shaved her legs with her father's razor. It took her two painstaking hours and she cut herself twice, and when she was finished she felt worse than when she started. As nice as her smooth legs felt, they didn't feel right. Will couldn't bear to shave her underarms in the end; the loss of the hair on her legs hit her unexpectedly hard, a lump forming in her throat as she stared down at the smooth skin, and she knew that doing the same to her underarms would end in tears. Instead she began borrowing her father's long sleeved shirts, allowing them to hide her difference below layers of plaid. It took about a month for her leg hair to grow back to the length it was before, and she let it.

 

When Will was 13 she had her first period – late, because half of the food intended for her ended up in the stomachs of local dogs, and this lead to mild malnutrition that nobody could convince her to take seriously. Will always considered the dogs more needy of the food than herself.

 

The bloody, sticky mess in her underwear left a deep sense of lasting horror and what she could only describe as wrongness. Her father, thankfully, bought her sanitary towels and tampons without making a fuss like some of the girls' parents were doing. Will immediately preferred tampons; they made her able to ignore the problem until she had to, didn't remind her of their presence and meant she could still climb trees with the boys.

 

~

 

There was a mirror in Will's room, positioned in a way that meant she could see her face and torso in it. She didn't like to look at herself, focus on her smooth cheeks and neck, her long eyelashes, the long curls usually pulled out of the way in a careless bun. The worst part was when her breasts grew enough that she could see the outline of them even through the baggy shirts she favoured, and a sports bra never pushed them down enough. She avoided looking at herself and hunched her shoulders so the flesh pressing against fabric was hidden. 

 

“I'm a boy,” she said one day, trying out the words. They sounded so good, so _right_ , but the words of her father echoed in her head, a reminder - _“You aren't a boy, Will.”_. She stared hard at herself in the mirror. In the right light her jawline looked almost masculine, and she knew guys with long eyelashes like hers. With her glasses on her jawline was accentuated, and when she squinted her face blurred and she could imagine hints of dark stubble on her face. Her eyes widened back to their normal size and she scowled at the pale skin of her hairless jaw. Billy, who was lying on her bed (unbeknownst to her father), whined loudly at the expression.

 

“I don't look how I see myself in my head,” Will told him, frustration creeping into her tone. “These,” Will gestured to her breasts, “and this,” Will tugged a lock of hair in agitation, “don't belong on my body, Billy! But they must, if I'm a girl. I can't be a boy, so I must be a girl. I just need to feel like one, and I can't. I hate it.”

 

Billy whined again. Will took it to be a sympathetic noise.

 

“Thanks, Billy,” Will said gratefully. Her brow creased in contemplation as she twirled the lock of hair in her hand around her index finger. “I could do something about my hair, maybe...”

 

Billy got up and twirled around her ankles, tail thumping merrily against Will's thighs. “You think I should do it, don't you?” Will asked, already picking up the scissors. She balanced them on one pinkie finger as she pulled her hair into a tight ponytail, then cut against the hairband so that the entire ponytail fell off in one dark mass. Her head felt immediately lighter without the locks weighing it down, and she shook her head, relishing the freedom. “That's better,” Will said, and began trimming the locks still trailing over her neck at the sides.

 

~

 

“Will, what have you _done?_ ” 

 

Will turned around, hair bouncing around her ears. “What, dad?”

 

“What happened to your hair?”

 

“I cut it off,” Will said simply. “Do you like it?”

 

“Why did you cut it all off?” Will's father looked somewhere between shocked and horrified as he stared at her shorn head.

 

“I didn't want it anymore,” Will said, shutting the door behind her.

 

~

 

“Oh my _god,_ ” Emily exclaimed loudly when Will walked into tutor, effectively drawing all attention. “What happened to your _hair?_ ”

 

“I cut it off,” Will said blandly, taking her seat.

 

“But it was so _pretty!_ ” Emily said, her voice pitched to carry across the room and carrying enough weight that her distress almost sounded genuine. Will already knew from a brief glance into Emily's eyes that Emily cared nothing for Will or any of her classmates as more than pawns for her own amusement, and any distress was entirely feigned.

 

“I didn't want it to be _pretty_ ,” Will replied disdainfully. “I wanted it like this.” Although perhaps less straggly – Will's skills did not include hairdressing – but she left that unvocalised.

 

“Doesn't every girl want to be pretty?” Emily asked, and the words hit Will stronger than she expected, tightening painfully in her chest. Should she want to be pretty? Will didn't want to be pretty, she wanted to be handsome, but that was something only boys were allowed. _You're not a boy,_ her father whispered in her ear.She blinked a few times and didn't reply, and Emily quickly lost interest.

 

A few hours later Will was sitting on a field by the school, feeding her lunch to the dog that hung around the area and had started waiting in the same spot for Will every lunchtime. Will had called the dog Minnow when they first met, as it was tiny, and had silver-gray fur and a fondness for fish.

 

“Hey!”

 

Will turned to see the girl who'd joined their tutor a couple of weeks ago walking across the field, waving enthusiastically. Her name was Beverly, Will thought, but she couldn't quite remember. They'd never spoken, Beverly seeming rather quiet and content to just observe the other children, similar to Will herself.

 

_Himself?_ Will contemplated momentarily, as she kept doing recently – unable to stop herself – before (as usual) guiltily dismissing the thought.

 

“Hi. You're Beverly, right?”

 

The girl grinned as she arrived at where Will and Minnow were sitting, plopping herself down next to the dog and stroking its ears with one hand. “Yeah. Will, right?”

 

“Yeah.” Will fed Minnow some more bread from her sandwich, listening affectionately to the sound of the dog's teeth clicking hungrily together.

 

“This your dog?” Beverly asked, twisting her hands in the long sleeves of her red sweater. “She's cute.”

 

“Nah. I just feed it- her. How do you know it's a girl?”

 

“She was on her side a minute ago. No balls.”

 

Will sat silently for a moment. Genitals seemed to matter so much in determining who you were, and though obviously the dog wouldn't care either way and the situation was completely different Will couldn't help but compare them. “Her name's Minnow,” she offered hesitantly, looking at the rips in Beverly's jeans and sweater and seeing nothing more sinister than tree climbing and play-fighting with her brothers.

 

“Cute. Look, I-” Beverly hesitated, looking awkward. “I was just wondering, um, what you like to be called.”

 

“What?”

 

“Like, he or she?”

 

“But I'm a girl,” Will said, dumbfounded. Beverly blushed.

 

“Sorry. I thought you might be- nothing. Sorry. Can we forget I asked?”

 

“Thought I might be what?”

 

“Nothing, don't w-”

 

“Beverly, please?”

 

Beverly sighed and picked at her sleeves with short, uneven fingernails. “Okay, so, you've got to promise not to tell anyone.” Will nodded, and Beverly turned so they were fully facing each other. “I've got four brothers and a sister. But when I was little I thought I had five brothers. The thing was, Jack was a boy physically, but in her mind she was a girl. So she told us, and she got my hand-me-down dresses and stuff for a while because my parents thought it might just be a phase, but then it wasn't and now she's called Jackie. I thought you might be the same but opposite, because you always hunch your shoulders and wear baggy shirts, and sometimes you make your voice lower to make it sound like the guys in our class, and whenever anyone calls you cute or pretty you look upset. I'm really sorry.”

 

“Isn't that just stupid? You're born a boy or a girl, and you can't change that, can you?” Will repeated the words her father had said when she tried to talk to him again after the skirt incident, refusing to allow the hope budding in her chest to unfurl. Beverly's back straightened in indignation.

 

“No! Sometimes people's bodies don't match up with who they really are, and it's called being-” Beverly cut herself off, frowning in thought. “Transgender, I think. There are lots of people who are transgender; Jackie knows some of them from a support group she went to. You mustn't tell anyone about this, though,” she added hurriedly. “Some people don't like people being transgender, are scared of it, because-”

 

“People fear what they don't understand,” Will said quietly. Beverly reached out and squeezed her hand tenderly, an understanding smile on her face.

 

“You don't have to be scared with me,” she said. “I'm not afraid. Do you want me to ask again?”

 

Will took a deep breath. This was a huge occasion; someone was recognising her for who she was – for who _he_ was. Will didn't have to correct his own thoughts now, if he wasn't the only one who was different. Maybe what he was was okay, and normal. Beverly seemed to think so, anyway. Maybe he didn't have to hide from everyone anymore – there was someone who, although she might not understand completely, understood enough that Will could be honest with her – and maybe, if Beverly thought it was okay, Will could allow the feelings through that had been smothered for so long, had swelled and shown themselves as scratched words on thighs when they remained unreleased.

 

_I'm a boy. I do not have to act like a girl just because of my body. Why should I?_

 

_That isn't fair._

 

Will let them wash over her – over _him,_ in a rush of emotion, finally letting them from the back of his mind to the forefront. He felt tears well up in his eyes, hot and burning and joyous. He touched the cuts on his thighs through his jeans, scratching over the word 'girl' where he had carved it into himself as a desperate reminder to act how he should. Not anymore, he thought, and looked into Beverly's eyes.

 

“Yes please,” he whispered, voice choked.

 

Beverly's eyes crinkled. “So, I was wondering. Should I refer to you as he, or she?”

 

“He, please,” Will said hoarsely, and the tears began to fall.

 

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first chapter of a planned story but can be left as a stand alone. I've got a vague storyline planned out but no concrete plot or schedule. Hope you enjoyed!


End file.
